A critical look at the current and longstanding ethos of childbearing, the repercussions it’s been having on human health and society, and its relation to the recent microbiome research.
Update: Looks like this is the response from some of the researchers/authors I contacted about this:
Preserving microbial diversity (2018): http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6410/33 — they seem to be in complete agreement. My concern is that single paper will be inadequate to stem the tide. Even the news coverage that paper got was terrible and only focused on one of the least important aspects — the “microbial Noah’s Ark”. The more important aspects are the immediate steps to stop and reverse the extinction & societal consequences.
The current ethos of childbearing is abhorrent, and largely contributing to the major health crisis we’re experiencing, and most of society’s problems.
It can be described as incredibly neglectful and irresponsible. Where children are created as an accessory to their parent’s lives, rather than an individual human being who deserves to be healthy, athletic, happy, intelligent, and free of unnecessary suffering. And unhealthy people using their bodies to create more unhealthy people is leading to an ever expanding percentage of the population who are severely unhealthy and malfunctioning in many ways.
It largely seems to be based on our primal instincts and doing just because “that’s what people do”, without thought in regards to whether we should be doing this or not.
Tradition is the enemy of progress and corpse of wisdom
I know many people’s initial reaction is to be offended, and that is not productive at all. So I will start out with myself as an example.
My mother was a model and my father a college athlete. Nearly all my siblings could have been runway models. Yet poor health is rampant in our family. I thought I could be a top professional athlete before my health decline put an end to that. And when I am not malfunctioning (currently under 20% function) I consider most of my cerebral abilities to be, compared to the average/majority, very high.
Depression runs in the families of both my parents to where they were suicidal or depressed themselves, and their siblings as well. With many people in my family’s lineage committing suicide. This is only the primary health problem I know of, there may have been others. Both my parents have various other health issues that most people might consider “somewhat minor”. They had 9 kids, nearly all of whom have various health problems, as do their kids. Such as: autism, cancer, mental retardation, physical/structural deformities, dyslexia, IBS, diabetes, eczema, asthma, poor mental health, various types of poor brain function, general poor physical shape, issues with sleep & stress, and so on…
When I first wrote about this around 17 years old/ago, one of my sisters responded with complete apathy, shirking all responsibility. For me, severely suffering for most of my life due to the consequences of the current ethos, and my poor function directly causing suffering of others around me, and seeing the severe ramifications of it in all aspects of society, and now seeing the precise mechanisms in the latest microbiome research day after day, while being ignored and avoided by “top” researchers in the field, drove me to write about it once again.
What is health? It is the level of functioning of all aspects of the human body. Genetic, epigenetic, mental, emotional, structural, chemical, neuromuscular, etc..
Just like a cake is the result of the quality of ingredients put into it plus the baking environment, and a plant is the quality of the seed, soil, fertilizer, water, sun, air, insect & microbial life, etc., so is the quality of a human being the result of everything used to create and grow them.
Human health is not simple. The body is an extremely complex biological machine. See: Humans as holobionts: implications for prevention and therapy (2018).
And this 2018 review: “It is now clear that the gut microbiota contributes significantly to the traits of humans as much as our genes, especially in the case of atherosclerosis, hypertension, obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), gastrointestinal tract malignancies, hepatic encephalopathy, allergies, behavior, intelligence, autism, neurological diseases, and psychological diseases. It has also been found that alteration of the composition of the gut microbiota in its host affects the behavior, intelligence, mood, autism, psychology, and migraines of its host through the gut-brain axis.”: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2018.01510/full
“This Is Your Brain on Parasites” (2016) is also an excellent book that covers how microbes in every part of our body influence our health and behavior, as does our immune system. But it’s important to keep in mind that we are FAR from knowing all the microbes that are impacting our health, development, and function. https://humanmicrobiome.info/testing/
Poor diet & antibiotic extinctions to our host-native microbial communities that have been evolving alongside of us for thousands, if not millions/billions, of years, compound over generations:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4850918.
All living things originated/evolved from microbes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis. Our mitochondria are a specific example https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Mitochondria.
A 2010 study showed that their lab rats had “an intestinal bacterial diversity exceeding that of the human gut by a factor of two to three”. And similar results found in secluded tribes.
Antibiotic use varies widely by country, among prescribers, and is often not medically justified. Physicians in Sweden prescribe about 60% fewer antibiotics than in the United States. Children in the US receive a mean of 2.7 antibiotic courses by age 2, and 10.9 by age 10 (2018). In the USA, about one in two women is prescribed an antibiotic during pregnancy or at term (2019).
“Antibiotics are among the most commonly prescribed medications for children, but prior research has suggested that nearly a third, if not more, of outpatient pediatric prescriptions for antibiotics are unnecessary”. Adults too [2016][Jan 2019][Mar 2019][Dec 2019].
All this is why when you see everything impacted by our microbiomes — https://humanmicrobiome.info/intro/ (see “more effects of antibiotics” section especially) — it makes perfect sense that all kinds of diseases (and general poor health) have been on the rise in recent decades.
Mortality in midlife in the US has increased across racial-ethnic populations in recent years (2018). “That death rates are increasing throughout the US population for dozens of conditions signals a systemic cause and warrants prompt action by policy makers to tackle the factors responsible for declining health in the US.”
Chronic disease and general poor health have been drastically increasing globally in recent decades.
An analysis of some 730,000 IQ test results by researchers from the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Norway reveals the Flynn effect (gradual increase in intelligence) hit its peak for people born during the mid-1970s, and has significantly declined ever since [2018].
Being unhealthy leads to more antibiotic use, which leads to more extinctions, leading to unhealthier children, and so on. A vicious downhill cycle.
It’s completely reasonable to use modern medicine to save lives, but it’s extremely problematic and unethical for those damaged people to then create more damaged people and contribute to this horrible cycle.
Another example of the damage we’re doing:
30% of people die from ‘x’ illness. So antibiotics are given to 100% of people with that illness.
It seems very likely that those 30% of people were unhealthy — developmentally and/or microbially deficient (Eg: [1][2]). Yet due to that minority deficiency we’re now damaging 100% of people who come down with ‘x’ illness.
In this way, unhealthy people are bringing down the healthy portion of the population with them.
In his excellent book “Missing Microbes” Martin Blaser gives a few examples of this type of thing. One of which is Group B strep:
“Women in labor routinely get antibiotics to ward off infection after a C-section and to prevent an infection called Group B strep. About 40 percent of women in the United States today get antibiotics during delivery, which means some 40 percent of newborn infants are exposed to the drugs just as they are acquiring their microbes.
Thirty years ago, 2 percent of women developed infection after C-section. This was unacceptable, so now 100 percent get antibiotics as a preventive prior to the first incision. Only 1 in 200 babies actually gets ill from the Group B strep acquired from his or her mother. To protect 1 child, we are exposing 199 others to antibiotics”
A single unhealthy person is bringing down 100% of healthy people with them. We are not saving lives with this type of antibiotic use. We are extinguishing the human race.
And this is made even worse by the fact that antibiotics for GBS is not even supported by the evidence [1][2]!
During the past decade I’ve been solely focused on learning and experimenting with health, trying to cure myself. I have learned (largely from doing FMT (Fecal Microbiota Transplants) and other microbiome manipulations) that without a doubt, all my problems are due to missing microbes. And antimicrobials have done severe and permanent damage to me (and heard similar stories from many others) that almost cost me my life.
C-sections:
All operations come with mandatory antibiotics. This one occurs at one of the most important points of immune & microbiome development for the child. It even impacts breast milk. https://humanmicrobiome.info/maternity/
Poor health markers are primary risk factors for c-section [1][2]. There are also many non-medical risk factors in places where elective c-sections are freely allowed [1].
Mothers/parents are not fully informed about the potential harms to the child. They are most likely presented with this information (at best), which is woefully incomplete. I would be surprised if the majority of doctors were even aware of the all the problems, due to severe deficiencies in our “systems”. This is a major violation of informed consent, and Martin Blaser advocates for people to start suing hospitals to stop this kind of abuse.
Certainly, unavailability of abortion in many countries contributes significantly to the problem. People may feel like they never wanted to give birth but abortion/contraception was not available so they choose c-section as the least-bad option. Similarly, horrific things are happening in places like the Philippines [1][2], where any contraception is religiously banned [1].
The extension of this problem into the professional sphere has severe consequences:
It seems that by default people place full trust in professionals and their institutions. But after a decade of interacting with them and observing them on social media, at their workplace, in the news, and in their scientific publications, I have lost all faith in professionals and their institutions. It is now apparent to me that the data that shows the vast majority of the population poorly functioning extends to virtually all professions. This is an incredibly worrying conclusion that, for the rest of my life, will be driving me to remedy.
Examples (a few of many) of the severe consequences from poorly functioning professionals and institutions:
Health, research, medicine:
Doctor, researcher, and institutional ignorance and ineptitude:
* https://maximiliankohler.blogspot.com/2020/02/are-people-in-public-health-failing.html
* https://archive.vn/WuZm2
Doctors and medical system: https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/doctors-are-not-systematically-updated-on-the-latest-literature-what-t.27/
Doctors and researchers: https://maximiliankohler.medium.com/do-not-eat-dirt-63b5d04bf4ca
Research ineptitude and fraud: https://twitter.com/RetractionWatch — https://scienceintegritydigest.com/ — https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02035-2
Doctor, medical system, and institutional ineptitude and harm: https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/challenging-the-validity-of-the-new-and-old-usa-gbs-guidelines-oct-201.52/
Regulatory, research system, and institutional ineptitude and harm: https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/another-letter-to-the-nih-and-fda-cancer-patients-as-fmt-donors-if-you.59/
Flawed individuals and institutions, and current education system: https://maximiliankohler.medium.com/eugenics-past-present-and-future-74d0ea5998b4
Various examples from all areas of society: https://www.youtube.com/user/LastWeekTonight/videos
More: Idiocracy, Part 1. Scientists in education only.
Regulatory bodies and industry:
I think people frequently confuse being educated with being intelligent. It is clear that many, if not most, degree-holders are poorly functioning in some way. Whether physically or mentally or both. When I scouted Arizona universities for FMT (fecal microbiota transplant) donors, upwards of 95% of people were visibly very unhealthy.
You can have good function in some aspects of the brain but not others [1][2]. For example, I have severe deficits in the areas of memory and “word finding/sentence forming”. While I observe a large percentage of people to seem to lack “interconnectedness” in the brain and thus have severe deficits in analysis, evaluation, association, comparison, reasoning, problem solving, and reaching rational, accurate conclusions based on all available data.
If you wonder why the world (politics, religion, etc.) is so divided, this is a huge part of it [1][2]. A huge percentage of the population completely lacks higher level cognitive abilities, and have various emotional dysfunction. With most people malfunctioning both ‘currently’ and developmentally; both software and hardware.
Being at the top end of that graph and finding yourself at the mercy of the vast majority who make up the middle (as is natural for a democracy, or when suffering personal health issues) might be compared to an adult being tied up while their toddler plays with a loaded pistol in front of them.
I believe the current dystopia is largely due to this problem being self-perpetuating faster and faster via the poor-health proportion of the population ever expanding. Meaning, the percentage of the population who cannot accurately evaluate themselves or their decisions is ever increasing. See Dunning-Kruger effect.
Many intelligent people have been talking about this throughout history. Mostly they are ignored or met with alarmist, thought-terminating clichés/accusations.
This subject seems to be so taboo to the point that a number of PhDs and MDs are bending over backwards to avoid it, and thus coming up with dangerously erroneous “alternatives”, that mostly only lead to further exacerbation of the problem. In this example, their “eat dirt” “fix” would more likely lead to more infections, antibiotic use, and dysbiosis.
A genome-wide association meta-analysis in 269,867 individuals identifies new genetic and functional links to intelligence (2018) — “Intelligence is highly heritable and a major determinant of human health and well-being.”
If you look at the 2016 US presidential elections, the 3 main candidates’ supporters were separated into blatantly distinct phenotypes/tiers of health. And in my opinion, by far the most unhealthy one won. There’s supporting evidence too.
This same population votes for representatives who exacerbate, rather than fix, the issues that contribute to the poor health of the population — like environmental/industrial pollution, various health & education policies, etc.. Thus the self-perpetuating, ever expanding nature of the problem.
I don’t want to get too political with this, so I’ll just end by saying that the objective evidence shows that a political group who is in the vast minority in most countries is the most intelligent, and largest (percentage-wise) supporters of evidence-based policy, and holders of evidence-based beliefs.
Also, it was posited that many DJT voters were doing so as a cry for help, due to feeling like they’ve been largely ignored by the other main party. I think there is something (health-wise, and other) to this. Related: “Pathogens and Politics: Further Evidence That Parasite Prevalence Predicts Authoritarianism” (2013).
Weston A. Price’s “Nutrition and physical degeneration” also provides a lot of support for these topics, and it, or a similar & more recent book, should be mandatory reading as part of a nationwide high school health curriculum. Yet he literally says the same thing and 80 years later it still hasn’t been implemented. It likely would have prevented the current major health crisis if it had. How long will we continue down this path?
The urge to have children is a primal, inherent biological one, just like food, sex, sleep and companionship. But for instances where there are no pros and only cons, we must rise above, and not be slaves to our primal instincts.
There is no need for more people. If you’re not familiar with the impacts overpopulation is having on the earth, this seems like a good start: http://www.everythingconnects.org/overpopulation-effects.html
Not having kids is by far the largest impact any person can have in regards to climate change.
“Who is too unhealthy” is a great question usually asked accusingly, but should be asked sincerely. Likely, well over 90% of people should not be creating other people, certainly including myself and my family.
The reality is that less than 3% of Americans live a healthy lifestyle. And human health goes way beyond lifestyle into the territory of genetic and epigenetic (IE: microbiome) heritability.
Current sperm donor screening is inadequate, but would be better than the current “nothing”. This article says only 5–10% of men qualify to be sperm donors. Admittedly, not all sperm donor criteria may be directly related to the health of the child. But why shouldn’t we extend the health-related standards to all fathers? It seems extremely unethical to not do so.
A screening questionnaire for a parent wanting to have a child would likely look similar to this screening questionnaire for an FMT (Fecal Microbiota Transplant) donor.
A recent FMT donor qualification rate at a Danish hospital was 3 out of 700, 0.4%. And even then it looks like the criteria were not strict enough to result in effective donors for IBS.
It seems incredible to me that so many unhealthy people think their poor health will have no consequences on their children. Or people who completely lack understanding of human health and what it means to be healthy. It seems like the vast majority of people fall under one of these two categories.
A major part of the problem is severe and systemic deficits in education that fail to teach people, at the time of their developing the ability to have kids, about the impacts of their decisions, including the impacts on the health and development of the child, and on society as a whole.
But additionally, there seem to be a large amount of people who want to believe so badly that their decisions & health will have no impact on their offspring that they brush aside, and certainly do not seek out, any information to the contrary.
Creating a child is far more important and complex than many other things people currently have to get licensed for.
“Why am I doing this?” is a great question that every potential parent should ask themselves prior to conception.
Are my body and mind really in peak condition, enough to create a high functioning, healthy human being who will not suffer from physical or mental disease? Do I have a good enough understanding of human health and development to make this judgment? Am I able to grasp the systemic outcomes of a majority of the population being unhealthy and continuing to have children?
These are questions every parent should be asking and severely considering. Of course this should be included in high school health classes when people are becoming able to have kids.
Only 25% of mothers in the US adhere to the recommended exclusive breastfeeding period of 6 months. And there are reported benefits for breastfeeding for periods much longer than that. So mothers who are unable to provide their child with the vital nutrition they deserve are still having kids.
And the processed, junk food diets that a majority of parents are feeding to their kids is nothing short of child abuse, resulting in life-long physical and mental stunting and damage.
In an ethos that put the child’s health and development first, these things would not happen.
In recent years I’ve noticed that on Reddit parenting subs it seems that a majority of mothers are unable to/do not breastfeed, which is inline with the CDC report. Nearly every day there’s a thread at the top of one of the parenting subs contradicting the CDC guidelines, saying it doesn’t matter if you breastfeed or formula feed, there’s no difference. And 99% of the comments are in agreement.
It should be a huge red flag that a majority of women are unable to naturally feed their children. One might find some reassurance in that nature is saying “here’s a limit to how unhealthy you can be before reproduction is turned off”, yet we seem to be doing everything we can to move that bar lower and lower. And there are consequences to that. An Idiocracy [1][2] where the healthy, well functioning people are getting fewer and fewer, and being harmed by the other portion’s decisions, and brought down to their level.
There are also many abused and neglected children who need to be adopted by loving parents. Please watch the movie Short Term 12 (2013) if you want a child but may not be healthy enough to create one yourself.
A common defensive argument some parents make is that “my child wants to be alive despite their ailments”. Not only is this completely illogical due to the child only existing after it was created, but it is demonstrably false. All over the internet there are forums dedicated to the various chronic, incurable diseases that plague a huge majority of the population. And there can be no question that these people are suffering tremendously (completely unnecessarily), often to suicide and sometimes murder (see incels, etc.), and that people do not want to be sickly and poorly developed.
Possible steps to fix:
Reducing antibiotic usage. Likely very few people understand the long term damage from antibiotics. There are likely many healthy & athletic people who have an indifferent attitude towards STIs because they see them as easily treatable with antibiotics. And thus suffer permanent impairments. Example: https://www.idstewardship.com/common-antibiotics-flagged-for-debilitating-toxicities/ — https://archive.fo/8Lu3L. You can see in that last link that even medical professionals are not informed. There is a severe lack of informed consent when dishing out antibiotics, including circumstances like prior to elective/cosmetic surgery. All surgeries include mandatory antibiotics and the patients are not informed about the potential for long-term consequences. Doctors cannot inform their patients if the doctor is not informed themselves.
There are likely many other areas where antibiotic use is unnecessary/avoidable [1]. Prophylactic use and use for things like acne are HIGHLY questionable. Reducing unnecessary surgeries [1][2]. Antibiotic use in other medical scenarios (such as with GBS, etc.) needs to be more critically assessed based on the most current microbiome research; and done by people who have the ability to make objective, evidence-based decisions that take into account the long term consequences (vs the current case). Most of the existing assessments seem to only take into account antibiotic resistance.
Proper k-12 education (for both kids and parents) on how to avoid/prevent infections so that antibiotics as a treatment never come into the picture, would be very important.
Increased research into replacing antibiotics with phages. Currently much of the focus/coverage seems to be on antibiotic resistance, with headlines about “antibiotic apocalypse” in regards to antibiotics becoming useless due to resistance, but little to no recognition/coverage of the damage being done to our microbiomes. And when there is some coverage it’s often combined with dangerous, non-evidence-based suggestions that the damage can be reversed with non-host-native microbes such as found in fermented foods and dirt.
Heavily taxing processed foods and replacing them in schools with whole foods. We’ve done the reverse of this in the US in the past century. See the documentary Fed Up (2014).
Implementing policies to increase availability (and demand) of healthy whole foods. Making freely available high quality (not the current quality [1][2]) FMT donors world wide. Drastically improving high school health classes at a systemic level so that people gain a good understanding of what health is and what the consequences (to both the child & society) of an unhealthy person creating a child are. Programs that Michelle Obama tried to push, which focused on promoting whole foods to kids. Systemic improvements and standards for sex ed [1][2]. Birth control freely & easily available [1][2][3][4]. Incentivizing potential parents to take evidence-based parenting classes prior to having a child, and making sure these classes are systematic and up to date.
Greatly expand programs like this: This Woman Pays Drug Users Not To Have Kids (HBO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkERSYPLzqc — https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nnq747/project-prevention-compulsory-sterilization to communities/people shown in Rich Hill (2014), where the kids are clearly physically & mentally damaged via something that happened during pregnancy and childhood diet-wise & behavior-wise (like smoking and alcohol). And no, we’re not sterilizing poor people like some kind of Hitleresque eugenics program. The goal is to end the self-perpetuating cycle clearly demonstrated in the Rich Hill documentary. It should be viable to do this via education and contraception availability. Poor people are not inherently inferior. There are plenty of healthy people living in poverty who give birth to well functioning kids who go on to become top athletes, or other highly productive professions. In fact, in many developing countries people get less healthy as their economic status improves [1], likely largely due to switching to highly processed foods (I think this was covered in the China Study). But being poorly functioning/unhealthy does decrease a person’s potential, and thus increase the chances of poverty.
And quite contrary to Hitler’s Aryan race ideals, both genetic and gut microbiome diversity seem to be beneficial. The most convincing evidence I’ve seen generally supports mixed race people being healthier [example]. And my own observations definitely support that. Virtually every mixed race person I know or have seen has been fitter and more attractive than either of their parents. The KKK (and other white nationalists I’ve seen in other countries) for example, are generally very unhealthy, poorly functioning people. Also, Africans were found to have the greatest gut microbiome diversity, which may be largely influenced by their diet, but certainly no one can deny that Blacks dominate athletic sports.
In the US, nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended, so bringing that number down to 0 should be massively beneficial.
Of course, due to the aforementioned self-perpetuating nature of the problem, it seems unlikely for any of these fixes to be implemented any time soon. Especially due to the severe, systemic deficiencies in our medical, research, and education systems.
Apparently there is no central authority setting medical policy in the US. It’s up to individual doctors/facilities to do whatever they want. Example: high c-section rate [1][2].
The data strongly suggests optional/elective c-sections should be banned due to the adverse health impacts on the child. BMJ’s GRADE system was mentioned to me but the only thing I was able to find was a 1990 article saying antibiotics aren’t always necessary during c-sections. Yet as far as I know, they are given out 100% of the time. Also, the article ignores collateral damage done to the human microbiome, but that’s not surprising considering it was written in 1990. But I cannot find one written in the past 10 years.
WHO recommends the c-section rate be 10%. Most countries are 2–5x over that [1][2]. And in the US there is apparently no body that reviews the literature and sets policy. Thus there is not an existing mechanism for such a policy change.
This country is utter chaos. The exact same issues exist with all our “systems”. To me this seems to be due to people lacking the ability to think on a systemic level rather than a local/individual one.
